Van Doorman harrumphed but didn't say anything.
"Anything else?"
"Why didn't you move my people out there before?"
"Weel," Mahoney said, "there's a slight problem. Seems this fort is about three kilometers inside the Tahn lines. I didn't think your OIC would be a real swiftie at snoop and poop.
"Once you get positioned, give me a full status report. You'll coordinate through this command as to when you begin operations. I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding targets of opportunity."
"Thank you, sir." Sten saluted. So whatever remained of his people was going to be used as a fire brigade.
"One thing more, Commander. I'll let you pick a call sign."
Sten thought a minute.
"Strongpoint Sh'aarl't," he decided.
"That's all."
The first order of business, Sten thought, was finding out how badly the Tahn had savaged his crew of innocent technicians.
He expected a disaster.
Sten and Alex flattened as a Tahn rocket screamed in, scattering multiple warheads across what had been a complex of shops. Shock waves hammered at them, and then the ground decided to stabilize for a moment.
Cavite City lay in ruins, ruins sticking up toward the sky like so many hollow, rotten teeth. The streets were almost unusable for ground traffic, blocked by shattered buildings. And in the city there were only two kinds of people—the dead and the moles. The dead had been either left entombed by the blasts that killed them, or hastily cremated when they had fallen. But the city stank of death.
Everything living was underground. Deep trenches had been dug and roofed against overhead blasts. There was no such thing as a civilian anymore—the Imperial settlers and the few Tahn who had decided to stay loyal to the Empire were now indistinguishable from the fighting troops. They served as medics, cooks, and even fought from the same bunkers as the Guardsmen. And they died—the Tahn were very nondiscriminatory about who was and who was not a combatant.
Anyone with no immediate assignment discovered a new fondness for digging. The shelters got deeper and deeper as the siege lengthened.
Sten thought he saw Brijit vanish into an unmarked trench entrance as he and his twelve people worked their way forward, but he wasn't sure. If the trench housed a hospital, it would not have been marked—the eons-old Red Cross provided the Tahn with an excellent aiming point.
The closer they came to the lines, the worse it became. Sten was prepared for his own personal catastrophe.
Instead he got the first pleasant surprise since... hell, since Brijit had gone to bed with him. This war was becoming burdensome, he thought.
Actually, there was a series of pleasant surprises.
Now Sten saw why he had vaguely recognized the area his support people had been assigned to. It was at the slum end of Burns Avenue. Mr. Sutton had established his command post in the still fairly undamaged Rain Forest restaurant. Still better was the fact that two of Sr. Tige's sons had stayed with their business/home. The old man had disappeared on the third day after the landing. The sons preferred not to speculate but concentrated on cooking.
Even though the dome was shattered, the birds and insects were either dead or had fled, and the waterfalls were now stagnant green pools, there was still the food. Tige's sons managed to make even the issue rations more than palatable.
Mr. Sutton chuffed three times in succession when he saw the thirteen people who had been given up for lost. He went emotionally overboard and patted Alex on the shoulder once—the equivalent, for spindars, of hysterical joy.
And then he reported.
Sten had expected decimation among the motley crew of technicians and chairborne troopers, most of whom were probably slightly unsure of which end of a willygun was hostile and were surely unaware of certain infantry subtleties, like keeping one's head out of the line of fire.
Instead: six dead, fourteen wounded.
"The Tahn mounted—I believe that is the correct phrase—a most determined attack on our second day," Sutton said. "Their tactics were most foolish. They sent three waves of soldiers at us. We did not find it necessary to aim carefully. Their casualties were appalling, Commander. Just appalling.
"A day or so later, they attempted us again. Most halfheartedly. Since then, we have seen very little action. They appear to be terrified of us."
Sten raised an eyebrow—the Tahn were afraid of nothing. But there had to be some explanation.
A Guards sergeant commanding an attached support rocket battery provided it. "Our prog's that the Tahn figured your kiddies'd be a walkover, no offense, sir. They come in dumb, and got dead. Next time, they was just pro-bin'. Then—zipburp. We got curious, so I took out a couple of my people and lifted a prisoner. That's a terrible thing to happen to a Tahn, you maybe know. He says the reason your people didn't get wiped is 'cause everybody figures they're elite. Or decoys."
"Say what?"
"Put it to you like this, Commander. Your people go out on patrol. Nobody told 'em you're supposed to blackface. Or you ain't supposed to be showin' lights or smoking herb. Th' Tahn thought they were gettin' set up. Progged that your swabs had big backup. Plus, this Tahn told us, they couldn't believe any line animals'd build such clottin' poor positions. Hadda be some kind of trap. Guess they got somebody over there guilty of thinkin', huh?"
Sten laughed. And made a note to give the real skinny to whoever took over his section of the line; he wondered how the man would take the basic instruction—remember, tell your people to act real stupid. But in the meantime, he had to figure out how he was going to move his merry marauders back through the enemy lines to this probably non-existent fort.
Whatever he did, he figured it would get pretty interesting.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
As far as Strongpoint Sh'aarl't went, getting there was not half the fun.
It took five full nights for Sten's troopies to reach the long-abandoned fort. It started with the small problem that his sailors thought they were minor heroes instead of lucky sods. They had a group name—Sutton's Sinister Swabbies—which had been created by a livie journalist who had reported on the Battling Bastards of the Bridgehead. That, of course, had made the Empirewide 'casts—there was very little in the way of good news those days.
Alex and Sten privately dubbed their cocky swabs the Clotting Klutzes of Cavite.
Actually, either label would have fit. Through good fortune, they hadn't gotten instantly wiped out. And so they had survived long enough to learn combat tactics instinctually. Proof—they were still mostly alive.
Sten hoped to keep them that way.
He moved his detachment to the friendly point closest to this possibly mythical fort. They were ordered to delouse, drakh, and degrease.
Once again, Sten and Alex went point.
Sten was very tired of being the first man into danger, but he saw no other option. Fortunately, Kilgour felt the same and didn't bother complaining. But both of them would have traded their chances on salvation for eight uninterrupted hours on a feather mattress.
They slid through the Tahn front lines without problems, two floating ghosts. Finding that hilltop of the hidden fort was equally easy. Mahoney had sent an op-aimed missile onto its crest, a missile whose warhead area carried a nav-beacon.